


Football Pitches

by Sealie



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26034322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sealie/pseuds/Sealie
Summary: What is the rate of grey cast iron (Fe 94.3, C 3.4, Si 1.8, Mn 0.5%) corrosion in seawater? Joe wonders.Joe sparks ideas. Booker does the technology—he loves the mechanics. Nicky noodles through the art of the possible. Andy pulls them all together and executes the plans. And, honestly, Andromache the Scythian would never stop looking – have you met her?
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 39
Kudos: 275





	Football Pitches

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: none spring to mind. Andromache and Bookers bad coping mechanisms?  
> Relationship: nothing overt  
> Spoilers: prequel  
> Disclaimer: writing for fun and not for profit  
> Beta: Springwoof is the star in my firmament. Thank you, Babe.  
> comments:  
> Haven't read the comics yet (saving up for the graphic novels)

**Football Pitches  
By sealie **

_**In Which Joe Proves that He is a Child of Science** _

It is Joe, with close to a thousand years of experience, and son of a culture with more than a thousand years of math and sciences behind it, who made the realisation as he was escaping the sandy beaches of Dunkirk before the relentless heel of Nazi Germany. 

“What is that?”

He shouldn’t have been up by the forward guns, but he had lost Nicolò in the press of escape five miles outside Dunkirk and this was a high point on the ship to better see the souls still straining in the water. 

The horribly young ensign took his headphones off and stared at Joe. “I’m listening for submarines.” 

The boxy device had a long arm over the side of the gunwale and a cable that stretched down and into the water. 

“Off the bridge, soldier!” the captain ordered. 

There was blood in Joe’s nose, filling his face behind his eyes and dribbling down his throat. He was used to it--his exhausted body struggling to heal an injury that he had thought had perhaps cleaved his head in two? Joe retreated. He knew when to stand his ground; the captain was understandably busy. 

The world made lazy sweeps around him. The deck heaved and breathed. Joe blinked and the ants resolved into the rescued on the deck. 

Wind pushed smoke onto the beaches and obscured the little boats bravely heading into shore to pick up more evacuees. Nicky might not even be on this ship being ferried to Dover? Perhaps on one of the other boats? The pulse of the headache behind his eyes made it difficult to concentrate. Joe had seen the smallest of skiffs, manned by a father and too young son, almost touch the beach. Joe had given his place to a soldier who was hardly older than the child helping his father, and had chosen to swim into the Channel to reach one of the larger boats moored further off. The waters were cold but they were still. The ache in his head had lessened with the water’s coolness. 

He had been plucked from the water as he towed another soldier northwards to English shores. The smaller boat had unloaded its burden of devastated and exhausted soldiers onto the larger vessel, on which Joe now stood, and then turned back to the shallower water to rescue more men, where the deeper-draft boats could not venture. 

So brave. 

Joe struggled through the chaos, looking for Nicky. He had to be here? He had to be safe and not drowning…. The press of men took his breath away. The ship had to be at capacity. 

“Sit. Stop. You’re not helping.” A stocky red-head caught his arm and pushed him down between two exhausted servicemen. “Are you injured?” 

He had been. Badly, he sort of remembered. His empty guts clawed. He wasn’t anymore, but hunger made him slow to heal. A white bandana with a red cross was wrapped around the child’s arm: medic. 

“It’s not my blood,” Joe lied. Growing mushy bits moved inside his brain, he thought confusedly. 

“Fine.” The medic scrutinised Joe, checking his eyes. “You can look after these two.”

“What?”

“Get another dressing on his stump.” The red head pointed at the injured one at Joe’s side. Everyone looked young after almost a millennia but these two were far too young for war. “Tight, no matter what.” 

Joe, unfortunately, was well versed in treating severed limbs.

~*~

Dover was insane. Soldiers only remained standing because of the press of their exhausted companions. One helped another as they trudged down gangplanks onto solid ground that somehow moved beneath their feet into the arms of the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Red Cross. Joe’s boots squelched and his fatigues were cold and heavy, and stiff with salt. The offered cup of tea in an enamel cup was a welcome thing indeed. English. Too much milk, he thought, but the sugar was a joy.

Immortality had its advantages, but the downside was the Hunger. He and Nicky had starved very many times. 

He was hungry, but the pain was just hunger for food. Where was the light of his life? Would he turn a corner, or would it be five hundred years before he saw his beloved again? Joe bit the edge of the cup hard against the panic. The smell of the rich fat of the milk on top of the stewed English tea filled his nose. 

Andromache always had plans within plans and a thousand contingencies. They had numerous permutations, depending on the normal or whether they were actively engaged in war. Their current rendezvous should be with Andromache and Booker in the capital. He hadn’t lost Nicky, he couldn’t lose Nicky, even now Nicky should be making his way to the Savoy Hotel in London.

Joe was wallowing in the black. 

A housewife with knotted headscarf and apron held out a roll, automatically Joe took it. Bacon hot; melted butter dribbled between his fingers catching on the webbing. The temptation to lick was a hard punch to his gut. But he passed the roll to the man behind him and wiped his hand on his filthy fatigues. 

Bacon sandwiches and sausage rolls—warm and filling—and nowhere he could go. The gifts were honestly given under the parsimony of warfare. Pasties? 

“What is in the pasty?” He knew their form from a strange year in the tin mines of Cornwall and the heavy foot of the owners on his neck. 

“A bit of corned beef, mostly tatties, neeps, and a smidge of gravy,” a young Scottish mother heavy with child told him. 

He took a pasty and stepped away from the table and back into the throng of evacuees, food in one hand and tea in the other. He had enough sustenance to take him from this place and onto the road to London.

~*~

He caught a lift on the road. His fatigues brought questions, which mostly boiled down to why wasn’t he with his troop? The flaking blood still matting his closely cut, curly hair, despite swimming what felt like half the Channel, meant his vacillation was blamed on head injury and some new fandangled diagnosis, when he was deposited by his benefactor into the arms of hospital staff on the outskirts of London.

He escaped questions amidst the chaos of the hospital being one of many inundated by soldiers from France.

All roads lead to Rome; why hadn’t he seen Nicky on the same road?

~*~

In some ways, expensive, hoity-toity hotels offered more cover than seedy hovels. Protecting wealthy guests brought anonymity, and staff were cowed. The Savoy seemed to offer neither at the moment. Clean cut officers and black-suited bureaucrats scurried up and down the front steps. The hotel appeared to have been taken over by the military.

He wanted Nicolò.

There might be a message at reception, he should check. Yet to walk up those shallow marble steps into the ornate foyer a scruffy, wrinkled, and bloody mess would garner attention. He was effectively AWOL. Joe sat on the curb, knees clasped against his chest. 

“Wotcha, mate, you alrigh’?” 

Hooking his chin over his knees, Joe tried to figure out what to do. Growing back half his head clearly had ramifications when stymied by exhaustion and near starvation. The wide road seemed an impossible chasm. He curled tight, interleaving his fingers together he wrapped them around the back of his skull and simply sat. 

“Mate? Do you need help?” 

The voice was persistent. 

A man, crutch under his arm, one trouser leg empty and pinned, peered down at him.

“I? My friends should be staying in the hotel.” Joe pointed with his chin. “I should go over there. My family.” 

What if Nicolò wasn’t there? He was almost too afraid to find out. 

“You should.” The man shifted his crutch bracing himself better and offered his hand. “Go to your family, mate. They’s important.” 

Standing felt like the hardest thing in the world. The man shook his hand, insistently. Joe released his hard grip on the back of his head and clasped the man’s hand. He stood, hardly leaning any weight on the legless man, but taking his help. 

“Are you…. The blood—“ 

“Thank you.” Joe needed to keep moving. If he stopped again he would sleep, even if it was in the gutter. Rapidly crossing the wide road, dodging people and traffic, he focused on his goal. 

He did cause a stir as he strode towards the reception desk but the staff were too well trained, and his rate of pace caught the colonel smoking in the lobby by surprise. 

“Can I help you, captain?” the receptionist asked politely. 

Joe drew himself tall, lifted his chin and looked down his nose. He carefully placed his papers, damp and curled on the mahogany desk. He set his finger next to the quite frankly unflattering photograph. 

“Please can you send a message up to Lady Andrea’s suite and tell her that Bahram Hassan Mirza is in residence.” Joe raised an eyebrow. “I assume that my rooms are available. You appear… busy.” 

“Yes, your highness, we are indeed busy,” the receptionist said precisely, and held out a key, “but your rooms are available at this time.” 

“Thank you.” 

“No luggage, your highness.” 

“Funnily enough, no.” Joe quirked a half-smile. 

“Would you like some fresh clothes sent up?” 

“Yes, thank you.” Joe escaped, striding to the lift. The lift attendant quickly pulled back the gate as he approached. 

Joe blanked in the lift. It wouldn’t be appropriate to stride into Andromache’s suite, especially, as he hadn’t actually confirmed that she was in residence. No member of staff would give information on a guest. He could only hope that Nicky had joined Andy and then went to Prince Bahram Hassan Mirza’s rooms. Booker’s penchant for the overblown got in the way at strange times. And why such a French proponent of the People had made them nobility for this safe house defied sense. 

He fell into his suite without knowing how he got from lift to door. 

The room was empty of Nicolò. 

He locked his knees. 

The gates closed and the lift had descended. He was free to turn to the door of Andy’s rooms, unobserved. As if commanded they opened. Andromache, his emira, filled the corridor. 

“Is Nicky with you?” Joe asked, but he knew that answer. Nicky would have beaten her to the door 

She shook her head. She opened the door further. “Come, wait for him with me. Tell me what happened in Dunkirk.” 

Joe shook his head, but stumbled towards her.

~*~

He sat in the claw-footed porcelain bath, moving his hand back and forth slowly in the water. The skin on his finger-tips pruned. He thought that he had had enough of water after treading in the Channel for hours. After Andy had fed him, or more accurately she had ordered room service, he had had to get clean.

The water. There was something about the water that he had to remember. He slipped under the surface and let the water slide over him slow and relentless. A stream of bubbles rose from his pursed lips. He was thankful that he had met Quynh before she was imprisoned in the Iron Maiden and cast into the sea. The torture that she endured and Booker shared in dreams was inconceivable. Booker didn’t speak of it, but hit the bottle before coffee most mornings. 

Joe sat up, water streaming. He remembered. 

“Joe? You all right?” Andy called from beyond the bathroom. 

He must have gasped. Grabbing a robe, he stumbled into the dressing room. “Andromache.” 

“Yes?” Slowly, she put her revolver back under the sofa cushion. 

“There was a device.” He began sketching a box in mid-air. “The ensign had padded listening headphones on his ears. He was listening to the water….” 

“Listening to water?” Andy echoed. 

“For submarines.” Joe non-explained. 

“Yusuf, il mio amore.” Nicky was at the door, as grimy and beaten as Joe had been mere hours before. 

Joe flew into his arms. The empty part of his heart filled.

~*~

_  
**Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus Was Not Developed Overnight**   
_

They had tried the diving dresses in 1718 and quite frankly hated them. Encased in a wooden barrel feeling around in the dark, over a mere twelve square foot before running out of air and being pulled back up to the boat, had been torture albeit on a smaller scale than Quynh experienced. 

Andy had drowned one hundred and seventy times and they hadn’t even searched a football pitch. Joe had stroked out on his fourth, his eighty-eighth, and two hundredth dive. Nicky had experienced some sort of seizure malady when he tried to go deeper, he had fitted so badly he had broken his back. 

There was something inimical about the depths.

~*~

_  
**Money Money Money**   
_

“Booker,” Andy said. 

“Yes, Boss.” 

“We need to employ a company.” 

“A company of what?” 

“Salvage.”

“I don’t understand, Boss.” 

“We neither have the time,” Andy huffed something that couldn’t be called a laugh, “or the skills to trawl looking for Quynh. But we can pay people to look.” 

Booker gnawed at a hangnail. “No. No.”

Andy raised an eyebrow. 

“No, Boss, we don’t _employ_ a salvage company we _run_ a salvage company,” he said gleefully, imagining money, all the money. “Think about it. Set up a couple of ex-servicemen. Navy. We kit them out. We’re the major shareholders – Joe can sort that out. Also, I bet you know where some wrecks are closer to shore with treasure in the Mediterranean. We set them on it, get them trained up, they’ll be self-funding in a couple of years….”

“Glad you’re following my thoughts.” Andy tapped a cigarette butt into the palm of her hand and watched it hiss. “Get on it.”

~*~

**  
_We Are Not Bats_   
**

“Sonar?”

“Yes,” Joe said, “it’s the next level up from hydrophones. Instead of listening we use sound to reflect back the seabed to see.” 

The sea of perplexed faces told Joe that he hadn’t explained himself very well, but Booker was looking upwards to the right thinking hard. 

“Think of it when you fight in a darkened room,” Joe offered. 

“I try not to go into dark rooms,” Andy said drolly, “it’s asking to be shot.” 

“Or on a moonless night,” Joe continued, “you listened, you mapped, you looked for out of place.”

“So this sonar,” Nicky said slowly, “is noise and like an echo it reflects. And the time?”

Joe nodded enthusiastically. 

“The time it takes to come back tells you the distance?” Nicky hazarded. 

“And how much comes back,” Booker added, practically cross-eyed as he thought it through, “a padded room… a soft muddy bay doesn’t echo?” 

“I think so.” Joe leafed through the thick military document, the black carbon printed ink smudging his fingers. 

“Quynh was encased in metal. Metal is hard,” Andromache the Scythian said. 

“Yes,”

“This can find Quynh?” 

Joe closed the book, setting his hand on the cover. “It will help us. It works, but Quynh’s prison is very small and the ocean is very, very big.” 

“It certainly is an improvement on our trawling and dropping plumb lines.” Nicky pulled the book out from under Joe’s hand. “We could cover a larger area, yes? No? To see under the water is a special thing.” 

“Booker,” Andy began. 

“I’ll get on it.” 

Joe was interested. He was interested in everything. Joe read widely: art; science; mathematics; philosophy… anything. He sparked ideas and plans. Booker was methodological. He would take this complex new science down to its component parts and build it back up in understandable units.

Sonar is in its infancy, Joe understands, but it was truly a step in the right direction. Booker would be driven; he dreamed of Quynh.

~*~

_  
**Things Get Heated**   
_

“Olex is open source; it runs on Linux!”

“RoxAnn!” 

“I will die on this battlefield!” 

“What are you two--” Andy emphatically did not say _idiots_ , but her tone was clear, “--talking about?”

~*~

_  
**Maps Are the Most Fascinating Thing in the World**   
_

Nicolò de Genova had been born and brought up on the coast. His family were seafarers, and physicians, and a host of other trades, but they lived and breathed the sea. It was at odds with the Old Guard’s fear of the depths, but Nicolò had only shrugged when Joe brought that up. 

He knew how to sail. He understood currents. Nicolò didn’t only collect maps; he made maps, beautifully detailed, exquisite maps. After they had liberated Andy from the ruinous hold of the Witchfinder General and understood the horrors of Quynh’s fate, Nicolò had brought out his maps, notebooks, and abacuses. 

They had escaped from Plymouth carrying Andromache’s flayed body and townspeople determined to kill them over and over until they were truly dead. Spawn of Satan had been the weakest of insults thrown at Yusuf. 

Joe sparked ideas. Booker did the technology—he loved the mechanics. Nicky noodled through the art of the possible. Andy pulled them all together and executed the plans.

“Nicolò, beloved,” Joe said. He set a journal down, holding open the four hundred and twenty third page. “What do you think of this?” 

“Fluctuations in the herring and pilchard fisheries,” Nicky read the title out loud, “of Devon and Cornwall linked to change in climate since the 16th Century. I—Uhm. I--?” 

Patiently, Joe gave Nicky the time to follow his thoughts. And then Joe turned to the kitchen counter to start dinner for them all as Nicky painstakingly began to read the English scientific paper. 

“Italy,” Nicky read out, as Joe diced onions, “was by far the largest market for exports from Cornwall, and Cushing (in 1957) gives figures for this trade from 1770.” 

“You do like to eat fish,” Joe agreed and decided to add prawns to the curry. 

Long nose firmly embedded in the book, Nicky wandered off. Joe let him go, knowing that he likely was going to dig up some maps.

~*~

Joe plated up prawn bhuna, light on the spices--Booker was remarkably conservative in his choice of spices--flatbreads and rice.

“Dinner,” he called, and again, when Nicky failed to join them. 

Nicky came to the kitchen table with the journal, notebook, and atlas tucked under his elbow. 

“Do you remember…?” Nicky began. He looked at Andy, sorrowfully. “Do you remember in the harbour, in Plymouth, what the fishermen were landing?” He didn’t need to say when in Plymouth.  


“Fish?” Andy said flatly, done with the conversation before it began. 

“Yes. Large thin fatty fish? Small silver swimmers? Flatfish? Sharks?” Nicky said. “Please?”

Who could resist a soft please, Joe thought. 

“They salted barrels of hernen,” Andy said tightly. “The quayside was packed. You could run the entire harbour wall without touching a stone.”

“Hernen?” Nicky rolled the word on his tongue. 

Andy shrugged. “That’s what they fished with nets? The fisherwives traded hernen. There had been a good fishing season.” 

“Hernen? What’s a hernen?” Booker asked. 

“It’s not a fish that I am familiar with,” Nicky said, perplexed. Plucking the pencil tucked behind his ear, he wrote the word in his notebook. 

“We need a Cornish dictionary.” Joe had skimmed the paper before giving it to Nicky. “They speak Cornish in Cornwall?”

“Not anymore,” Booker said. They knew how it went; destroying languages was a tried and tested way of destroying cultures. 

“But they probably did in the 16th century.” Nicky scrunched his nose, thinking hard. 

“Why?” Andy asked. “Put the books down, Nicky, and eat.” 

Nicky obeyed. He spooned curry onto his plate and tore a generous hunk of bread. Stuffing curry and bread in his mouth, he mutely asked Joe to pick up the conversation, since it was his idea. 

“We have the Admiralty maps of the English Channel--”

“La Manche,” Booker corrected. 

“--and the Atlantic showing depth and reef,” Joe continued, used to being interrupted by his family. “and we know that currents change. But this might help us track how the currents were in the late 16th century and later.” 

“By knowing the fish?” Andy said, perplexed. 

“A cock crows,” Nicky said sagely, “and you know it is morning.” 

“Different fish are associated with different currents,” Joe explained. 

“And this will help us find Quynh?”

“Perhaps narrow down the area,” Nicky said. What he didn’t say was that it was a big area, because they knew that. At least they had managed to rule out the North Sea by scrutinising records of the sailing ships of the era. The vessel had likely headed into the Atlantic travelling across the Bay of Biscay and thence along the Portuguese coast to the straights of Gibraltar. 

The question that they had never answered was: how long had the terrified sailors kept a witch on board before casting her aside to unending torture?

Not long was likely. A woman? Worse yet keeping a witch on board a seafaring vessel? The crew would have mutinied if the Captain had insisted on days of seafaring. 

Nicolò had done the maths. The entirety of the English Channel was 75,000 square kilometres (29,000 sq mi). A football pitch was 0.01 square kilometres. That was seven million five hundred thousand football pitches to search before they even started considering the Atlantic and then the stormy Bay of Biscay. 

Searching with their fingertips strapped in a barrel had revealed the undersea world wasn’t flat. Sonar had revealed the magnitude of their problem. The ruffles and troughs of coastal waters a few miles offshore could be as complicated landscape as the valleys and mountains of the Bergamo Alps or the Picos of Europa but under thousands of metres of water.

~*~

**  
_Data Is the True Gold_   
**

“This is beyond annoying,” Joe fumed. He didn’t punch the laptop, but it was a close thing. 

“What, my love?” 

“Proprietary information.” Joe pushed back from the kitchen table, chair squeaking across grimy linoleum.

Nicky slid his fingers into the glorious curls at the base of Joe’s neck. The tendons were corded tight. Gently, he scratched, drawing a delighted shiver and a hint of relaxation. 

“I found this site. Magic.co.uk, which should show the undersea habitats around this godforsaken country, but it does not work, no matter how much I click and reload,” Joe fumed. “So, I thought that another site, related but different might help. EMODnet, should have seabed substrate, sediment accumulation, geology, and lithology – yet where do they hide the information?” 

“I can help you,” Nicky said already leaning over to take the mouse. 

“No. No. No.” Joe patted his hand. He continued, vituperatively, “After many clicks, through many pages, on that labyrinthine nightmare, I found databases, but I need something called desktop GIS.”  


Nicky bit his lip, and didn’t tell him that he had many versions of MapInfo and ArcGis installed on their computer mothballed in their favourite residence in Malta. And also, the resolution of the data was not good enough for their purposes. 

“But! But! It occurred to me that whilst you and I, Andromache and Booker, need to know about the seabed and the magic of the wind and waves, so do others. So, I emailed British Petroleum and European Aggregates Consortium about accessing their maps as Professor al Rahma.”

“And what did they say?” Nicky braced himself. 

“And they said: NO!”

Nicky sighed in sympathy, moving to curl around his love. 

“It is so frustrating!” Joe erupted to his feet. “Why. The answers are here. If only people would share! Why not share?”

“Joe.”

“We could be exploring the stars, not scrabbling in the dirt! Yet some bureaucrat, some company,“ Joe spat, “decides that this material thing or this idea is theirs and theirs alone and hoards it to no benefit except their own. You cannot eat oil. You cannot eat money. We need this so-called _data_!”

“Yusuf,” Nicky beseeched, reaching for him again.

Andy stood, labrys at the ready, in the doorway. 

“What’s happening?” Booker came up behind Andy, and let out a redolent burp. 

“I think,” Andy said, “we’re planning a heist.” 

“Exactly!” Joe turned in Nicky’s arms, pointing at her. “Boss! You’re the best.” 

“What are we stealing?” Booker asked incuriously. 

“Information. All the information, Book. This is your job,” Andy said.

“Okay.” Booker let all the vowels drip over his tongue. “Who? Why?” 

“British Petroleum and European Aggregates Consortium seabed stuff!” Joe shouted.

“Ah,” Booker’s mouth dropped open. 

“Data and models… Hydrographic models.” Nicky added a little clarity just in case Booker’s clear case of humungous hangover confused him. “Three-dimensional models.” 

“I’m kind of stunned we didn’t think of this before,” Booker mused. “They’ve got the resources. They’re gonna have the maps.” 

“And,” Nicky said, inspiration striking, “We should add the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence and La Royale Marine Nationale to the list.” 

“Merde.” Booker shuffled off to get his laptop.

~*~

_  
**O-ReSCUE Me**   
_

Orchid Recovery Salvage Cultural Underwater Exploration Ltd had been running since 1867, two years after the invention and patent of the aerophone. Albeit initially it had been focussed on salvage, restoring lost treasures to cultures and occasionally to museums, leading at the forefront of marine archaeology, presenting at conferences, and writing scientific papers had quickly evolved. The principal shareholders seemed to be less about profit (there was much) and more about sharing ideas and experimenting with every new kind of technology that crossed their path. O-ReSCUE might also possibly get involved in the occasional clandestine operation, including but not limited to helping migrants, but that wasn’t really mentioned. Although, it was in their Terms of Reference (unpublished). 

“Oh fuck, it’s almost September,” the Captain of the Labrys realised. “The Avicenna’s still stuck doing that salvage in the Aegean.”

“Yes, Captain,” his first lieutenant said. “Sorry, boss.” 

“We’re the closest, aren’t we?” 

“Yes, Captain. Sorry, Captain.” 

Leighton knew the technical specification off by heart. 

_Originally a statue with a halo, broad collar and slightly tapering body from shoulders to feet. Cast iron concretion will likely encrust the surface along with different organisms, depending on depth and attenuation of sunlight, rendering it camouflaged. Therefore, any item subject to the following dimensions—see figure 1—give or take twenty five percent, forged in grey cast iron, of an estimated weight of 108 to 453 kilograms or 240 to 1000 pounds* should be investigated._

(*previously written in imperial hundredweight and—Leighton’s favourite—the French quintal calculations).

He didn’t know what the owners were looking for, but they were dedicated in the search and clearly so had been their great-great grandfathers. 

“What’s the annual weather window looking like?” Leighton asked, even as he clicked on the long-term weather forecast. September might be generally ‘nice,’ but Leighton wasn’t prepared to bet any money on it. The Bay of Biscay was notorious for dense fogs in late spring and summer. The winter storms were severe. The reality was the weather in the Bay at any time could only be described as capricious and volatile. 

“Good. Predicting a mill pond.” Fatima pricked up. “Really good weather, sir. Big high pressure convergence sitting over the Atlantic.” 

“If it holds, we could do the inshore tracts,” Leighton contemplated. The Labrys had a ruinously shallow draft for her mass, making her a nightmare in stormy waters, but perfect for inshore work. “Might even get the seaspyder out on the zodiac.” 

“Captain?” Fatima leaned back in the pilot’s chair and craned her head over her shoulder. 

“This thing we’re looking for is effectively a cylinder—cylinders roll. Cannons turn up in the weirdest of places.” They had found a lot of cast iron cannons encased in concretion over the years. Sometimes Leighton even dreamed about finding yet another bloody cannon. 

Leighton pulled up the Celtic Sea and Bay of Biscay bathymetry on his computer. He overlaid the map file of previous surveys, 1974 to date, and set himself down to map their current survey. 

“You know,” Leighton mused out loud, tapping the screen with the end of his pen, “if the weather is going to be really good, let’s plot a course up Brittany to the edge of the Celtic Sea and the Channel and survey the Strait of Fromveur and around Ushant and the Ponant Islands.” 

The Fromveur Passage was notorious for its currents. It had been surveyed back in the 1980s but that was forty years ago, and the _thing_ had possibly-probably been dumped mid-English Channel. It might be another forty years or even longer because of the climate crisis before they could go back in and do the detailed, high-resolution survey they needed to discriminate a single cylinder of camouflaged-encrusted cast iron against a backdrop of practically any type of sediment from opaque muddy to hard rocky reef. 

“Aye, aye, sir.”

~*~

“Fits the spec.”

They had indeed been blessed with uncharacteristically good weather. 

Leighton pushed his glasses up his nose as he looked at the recording of the seaspyder’s feed. “Got a lot of concretion, almost looks like part of the reef. Might be fragile.” He checked the depth range. 

“Sixty-eight metres. Doable, but the rip’s going to be hard work for any divers.” 

“Tide’s neap neapy; will turn in about an hour and a half.” Fatima said. “Send down the ROV? Leastways, we can get a closer look while the divers prep? That flared head looks – I mean, Captain, we might have found it?” 

The glee across the bridge was palpable. 

“Okay.” Leighton clapped his hands together loudly. “Let’s get to it.” 

Deploying the Remotely Operated Vehicle took no time, since they had it hooked on the A-Frame at the ready. Fatima won the toss and got to be pilot 

“Think we should call the bosses?” Fatima gently nudged the joystick on her controls keeping the pitch and yaw under control as she kept the ROV on an even keel opposite the statue. 

Leighton gnawed absently on his thumbnail studying the monitor. The ROV hung in the slackwater letting them get a great view. Fatima clicked, capturing image after image. Should they grab the statue with the ROV’s claws? The combination of weather, tides, currents, turbidity, and hydrodynamics had all come together in prefect synchrony. The risk was moving it without the appropriate bracing might break it; worst case the iron could disintegrate if it was on the thin side of the Bosses’ calculations. Divers were really going to struggle with the currents and depth. 

The ROV’s lights set the statue in shadows of sharp contrasts amid bonewhite Dead Man’s Fingers and grazing urchins on the hard reef. 

“It looks like it’s jammed in tight in the rocks,” Fatima said. “Could put a GPS tracker on it?” 

They were supposed to contact the Bosses but they were always so devastatingly depressed when a great possibility turned out to be nothing. Leighton mentally weighed successfully retrieving the statue, or breaking the statue, against losing the statue, alongside telling Ms. Andrea Lykaios Tisak face-to-face that he had failed to recover the long-lost item. Regardless of the outcome, she was going to insist on a face-to-face meeting. 

Leighton swallowed. 

“Okay. Let’s get two divers down, as fast as possible, and we’ll do a snatch and grab. I’m not entirely convinced that it would be here if and when we manage to get back.” Leighton addressed his crew. “Right, I get everyone is excited, but full safety protocols. We’re doing this fast, but we’re not doing this half-arsed. Do not die, and do not make me tell Ms. Tisak that we fucked this up.”

~*~

The A-Frame creaked and groaned as it pulled up the half tonne weight of cast iron. Lighter than Leighton had anticipated, he figured that it was hollow. The divers were making their slow way to the surface taking regular decompression stops.

Marco and Harry hung over the stern of the Labrys, each with a boat hook, ready to catch the chains and ease their prize onto the deck as Randolph controlled the winch with a precise hand. 

Finally, with great deliberation, the statue emerged from the sea. Metal struts and winches creaked and groaned. Marco and Harry guided it closer. Water sluiced off the statue draining over the deck. A red crab dropped with a wet smack onto rubber matting. It righted itself, scuttled off the starboard side through a drainage hole, and back into the sea with a plop. 

“Carefully, carefully,” Randolph muttered to himself as he eased the cable strapped statue down onto the deck. Whisper soft, he set it down. Harry caught the winch hook and freed it from the webbing of straps around the statue. 

“Let’s get those cables off,” Leighton ordered. “We don’t want them to bite into the concretion and expose the cast iron to the air; it will degrade quickly.” 

Marco unfastened one of the straps and jumped back as an iron chain slithered away from the statue, links banging to the deck one after another with a machinegun clatter.

“Careful,” Randy began as a second ancient chain clattered away. 

Was that, Leighton wondered, a broken padlock in the coil of links? Why chain and padlock a statue? A loud thump broke the air, and Leighton immediately looked for the source of the noise on his ship. 

The hook swung in the air, had it banged the A-frame?

“Secure the winch hook, Harry,” Leighton ordered. “You know better.” 

Another thump and a clump of encrusted rusted iron fell away from the casing revealing a large hole. 

“Damn it.” Leighton knew that they had to quickly wrap the artefact to stop it deteriorating before their eyes. Should he have left it in the water for a more prudent recovery? 

Metal groaned, and with an unholy creak the front piece of the statue swung open. The crew simply froze. A pale hand from within pushed back the opposite piece. Marco jerked back, crossing himself as a black-haired revenant, shrouded in decaying scraps, sat up. Her eyes were like black coals in the dying embers of a fire. She opened her mouth to scream. 

Leighton beat her to it. 

“Motherf—“ 

_**Fin** _


End file.
